Biography

Hy Conrad is an American mystery author, game designer and TV producer, best known for his work on the ground-breaking series Monk (2002 – 2009). Most recently, he was a writer and co-executive producer of the Netflix series The Good Cop, with Tony Danza and Josh Grobin.

Conrad’s first job was as a child actor, appearing as one of Fagan’s Boys in the national tour of Oliver! He continued acting in New York and in regional theaters until 1980, when he wrote the book, music and lyrics for Ta-Dah!, a musical version of Much Ado About Nothing, which had a limited Off-Broadway run.

Conrad entered the world of mystery by designing and writing Murder, Anyone? and Many Roads to Murder, a series of interactive film mysteries that became two of the best- selling original programs on the Laserdisc format in both the US and Japan. That led to dozens of other solvable mystery games for companies such as Parker Brothers, Milton Bradley and Hasbro, including Clue VCR and Clue VCR 2. As the world of new media evolved, he created and wrote several interactive mystery projects for AOL and Prodigy. He was also creative director of Mysterynet.com, a site devoted to “all things mystery”, for which he wrote hundreds of short mysteries.

Continuing on the mystery theme, he has written 11 books of solve-it-yourself mysteries (Sterling Publishing), some aimed at the youth market and some more challenging volumes for adults, which have been translated into 13 languages. Throughout the 1990’s, Conrad regular contributed short stories to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

On the humor front, Conrad, along with his husband Jeff Johnson, wrote Things Your Dog Doesn’t Want You to Know (Sourcebooks), a popular collection of essays.

As a novelist, Conrad penned four original mysteries based on the TV series Monk (Penguin), and three books in a series about a travel agent detective, the Amy Travel Mysteries (Kensington).

Conrad’s TV career began when Monk’s creator, Andy Breckman, needed stories for the first season of the show. Breckman discovered one of Conrad’s works in a bookstore, made a phone call and asked him to work on the series. Conrad worked for the entire run of the Monk, the final two years as co-executive producer. In 2009, he became head writer and executive producer of Little Monk, a web series featuring Adrian Monk as a middle school detective.

Other TV work includes a stint as writer/consulting producer on White Collar” the pilot Mr. and Mr. Nash, co-written with Steve Martin, writer/co-executive producer on Probable Cause (an unaired series for ABC), and the series The Good Cop for Netflix.

Conrad garnered 3 Edgar award nominations for best TV episode for his work on Monk and won the Scribe Award for best novel of 2014.